Corpse Reviver No. 2
Harry Craddock’s warning in the 1930 Savoy Cocktail Book — that four of these taken in swift succession will unrevive the corpse — is the most quoted line in cocktail literature, and it distracts from what the drink actually is.
It is four ingredients in equal measure: spirit, liqueur, aromatized wine, citrus. Nothing is carrying anything else. Gin supplies structure, Cointreau supplies sweetness, Lillet Blanc supplies the soft vinous weight that keeps the drink from reading like lemonade, and lemon supplies the acid axis the whole thing balances on. Absinthe arrives last and in the smallest possible quantity, because it is aromatic direction, not an ingredient.
Get one of the four wrong by a quarter ounce and it shows immediately. That is not a flaw. That is the drink teaching you to measure.
Ingredients
- 30 ml Gin
- 30 ml Cointreau
- 30 ml Lillet Blanc
- 30 ml Fresh lemon juice
- 1 dash Absinthe
Method
- Add all ingredients, including the absinthe, to a shaker with ice.
- Shake hard, 10–12 seconds.
- Double-strain into a chilled coupe.
Lillet Blanc is not optional and not interchangeable with dry vermouth — it carries the vinous weight that stops the drink collapsing into a sour. Where the original calls for a specific gin, any dry gin with real juniper will hold the structure; the drink is defined by its ratio, not its label. The absinthe is a dash, not a rinse in this build. A rinse coats and a dash disperses; the dash reads through the whole glass rather than only on the first sip.